Big Blue Strikes Back

Could IBM's decision last month to donate a subset of its Rational Unified Process (RUP) code and documentation to the open-source community be a pre-emptive strike against Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System? According to some industry observers, the answer is yes.

RUP essentially is a collection of methods and best practices that can help developers achieve better quality and efficiency throughout the life cycle of a software-development project. It also can serve as a foundation architecture and set of Web-based tools for programmers to engineer, collaborate on and share best practices for software development.

Meanwhile, the Visual Studio suite of tools, which Microsoft officials tout to be the most significant developer release in company history, lets programmers engage in "personalized productivity" to create the next generation of applications for its upcoming Vista operating system, Office suite of desktop applications and the Web. It will also have methodologies that are bundled in and designed to quicken the development process.

"Within the Visual Studio Team Foundation, Microsoft for the first time will package up methodology and processes that will be more intimately connected with the development environment itself," says Melinda Ballou, program director at IDC's Application Life-Cycle Management practice. And with Visual Studio having come out earlier this month, "It made better sense for IBM to make this announcement in October and not November," she points out.

One of the most important reasons for releasing RUP to the open-source community, according to IBM officials, is that it saves developers from having to start every project from scratch, and makes collaboration among different development teams easier--inherently driving more innovation.

"The problem with software development is not that people don't know how to build software; that knowledge is out there," says Per Kroll, manager of methods for IBM Rational. "The problem is, [knowledge] doesn't reach development teams so they can easily access it. This announcement makes it available in a form that can be easily transferred."

Increasingly, according to Kroll, many software organizations are becoming global, and new teams of developers are being formed and disbanded with greater frequency. There is also more pressure to deliver quality applications--and to do so under budget.

But the lack of standards in some very basic development activities, including analysis and design, testing and project management, has increased time and overhead for many organizations. Adding to the situation is the fact that many best practices that could help sidestep this problem are siloed within a single development team or even with one individual, Kroll says.

According to recently released numbers by Gartner, nearly half of all internal software-development projects run over their budgets, with 90 percent of them completed late and 30 percent abandoned altogether.

IBM has garnered support from more than one dozen companies for its RUP announcement, including The Armstrong Process Group, BearingPoint, Capgemini, The Object Management Group and Unisys.

Some VARs are optimistic that the IBM announcement will create more opportunities for them by adding credibility to open-source development tools and practices. They think there still needs to be more missionary work carried out, however, even among the larger corporate accounts, before CXO-level managers will fully commit to mission-critical projects based on open source.

"This is a very positive step toward open source being accepted as mainstream by the large vendors," says Navin Nagiah, CEO of Cignex Technologies, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based VAR that specializes in open-source software solutions. "It will also encourage CIOs in the Global 2000, who have been skeptical, to actually take a good look at the possibilities it can offer."

Domino Effect

Besides counterpunching Microsoft's Visual Studio announcement, as well as adding more polish to IBM's image as a forward thinker in the open-source community, the RUP announcement could help sales of other IBM open-source products, core applications and tools, some observers believe.

"IBM is doing its best to keep its tools pervasive by offering them to open source free of charge," says Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of research at IDC's system software practice. "Once people adopt these tools, IBM can bring in other products designed to collaborate with those tools. It's a sound, competitive strategy."

Releasing the RUP to open source should also benefit the code itself. While some think it offers a fairly complete set of capabilities, they also believe the technology is not the easiest for programmers to work with.

"There is a lot of content and depth to it, but it is a little inaccessible. It is hard to customize and use," IDC's Ballou notes. "By putting it out there into the open-source world, others will enable it to be more extendible and more easily adopted."

A critical hurdle IBM must clear in getting RUP to be widely accepted--one that virtually all new development technologies face--is more human than technological: getting people to change their personal approach to development.

"As an IT therapist," Ballou says with a smile, "a lot of what we do is help people with changing their behavior and processes. It is the biggest barrier to success with application life-cycle management. But having the code out there in the public domain will really help with that."

IBM officials were reluctant to detail how Big Blue itself would use RUP in delivering open-source projects. Some believe the company will use it to create products that fill in the gaps between its project-management and portfolio-management capabilities.

"It is safe to expect that IBM will use the subset of RUP they are contributing to as the foundation for a more extensive product than their current Rational Portfolio Manager," says Michael Goulde, senior analyst for the application development and infrastructure research team at Forrester Research.

Method Composer Focuses RUP Toward The Enterprise

• Rational Unified Process (RUP): Designed as an adaptable process framework and not intended as a single prescriptive process, RUP lays out the process for developing software more efficiently by using proven techniques.

• Rational Method Composer: Represents a shift in RUP's focus from individual projects to enterprise-level, business-driven development. Composer includes RUP and extends it by adding new best practices in portfolio management, collaborative distributed development and services-oriented architectures. (RUP and Rational Method Composer will work with any of the 150 open-source projects IBM is participating in.)

• Rational Process Workbench: Part of the RUP platform, it is a set of tools designed to help VARs and larger IT shops customize RUP by leveraging a company's own expertise, best practices and internal knowledge. The technology will be largely replaced by the Rational Method Composer, according to company officials.